Like why planet? Why sphere? Why is there a solar system? Why system instead of no system? How did entropy create anti-entropy agents? Bees, humans, anything that builds non-random structures?
Sorry if this is a bad question, it just popped into my head and it won’t go away.
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Physics of low entropy systems probably get you to solar system and planets. The bit about life is interesting. I recommend you to watch this video by Jeremy England. If I remember correctly, it’s also part of the background of Dan Brown’s Origin book.
When you first pour milk in your coffee it is in a state of low entropy. If you leave it sit long enough it will eventually mix evenly and be in a state of high entropy. However, in between these two states there are lots of eddies and swirls; there is lots of complexity.
Planets, solar systems, bees, humans etc are the “eddies and swirls” of the universe going from a low entropy state to a high one.
This might help too: [https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2016/11/03/entropy-and-complexity-cause-and-effect-life-and-time/](https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2016/11/03/entropy-and-complexity-cause-and-effect-life-and-time/)
(The above is adapted from my understanding of Sean Carroll’s explanation I heard at some point.)
The leading theory that I know of says that at the beginning of the expansion of the universe fluctuations in the fields that make up the universe were magnified. The expansion took those ripples and in effect moved what would become matter so that there were pockets of “empty” space and pockets of space with more densely packed particles.
As for objects that are complex that would seem to violate entropy, they don’t. In the case of living things, they invest energy to produce order. In some sense entropy is a measure of the available energy in a system. When livings things use energy to create complex things, the main source of increasing entropy is lost heat. That heat is in a form no longer usable to produce more complex things and entropy increases.
You might enjoy [Chaos Bound](https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7591/j.ctt207g6w4) by N. Katherine Hayes.
This is a great question and one part of the answer that is often overlooked is related to life on earth. First, let’s take a look at crystals. They form on their own some very well organized structures and in this way, form structures that have less entropy. Life has come about on earth in a very similar way. Life has found a way using DNA, amino acids, and other building blocks to _decrease_ entropy over time. This was very unlikely but it happened! It’s fun to think about this fortunate event.
Note that this answer just supplements the other great answers given.
Two things to explain:
1) Entropy is the measure of *usable* energy in a system. You can think of it like the energy contained in unspent fuel, or the heat difference that powers a thermocouple. It’s also irreversible–like you can put a hot brick and a cold brick against a cold brick, and the heat will flow from hot to cold until the heat balances out, but you can’t put two room-temperature bricks together and get one to steal all the heat from the other.
2) You can see structure in just about *any* flow of energy. Look at setting a pot of water on a stove: as the hotter water rises, cooler water sinks, and you end up with patterns of rising and falling currents. Patterns from chaos…but in the end, it’s just the water trying to balance hot and cold.
Now scale that up. As far as we can tell, the entire visible universe started off by expanding outward with so much heat and energy that even atoms didn’t exist. We’re in a universe-sized “pot of boiling water”: until all the energy balances out, we’re in for a *whole bunch* of patterns out of chaos.
>How did entropy create anti-entropy agents?
It never did. Everything takes more energy to make than it puts out. Nothing even comes close to 100% efficiency on returns, and you’re assuming that planets and systems somehow produce more than 100% of the energy used to bring them into existence in the first place. Anything that happens causes entropy, even building structures and power plants. The net loss is always greater than the gain. If you could gain more than you lost, then you would have infinite energy and could reverse entropy. As far as we know, that’s impossible.
>Like why planet? Why sphere? Why is there a solar system? Why system instead of no system?
These are all easily answered by the laws of physics. Gravity exerts energy equally in all directions. This makes mass attract into nice balls of material. Mass that doesn’t fall into the sun is in constant freefall in orbit, but eventually even orbits decay. So the system we have now didn’t always exist, and will eventually not exist anymore in the future. There is no such thing as an anti-entropy agent.
>Bees, humans, anything that builds non-random structures?
Life, as complex and amazing as it may be, is still powered entirely by the sun and limited by all the available material on Earth. The sun is inputting energy into the Earth ecosystem, but the sun is losing vastly more amounts of energy in the meantime. The Earth doesn’t neatly collect 100% of the energy, and converting that energy into something else causes even more losses. So while it may look like the Earth is an amazing anti-entropy dynamo, it’s actually like blasting a flamethrower (sun) onto a firecracker (earth). Most of the flames don’t hit the firecracker, and the flames that do light the wick lead the firecracker to make explosive reactions at far less the energy output of the flamethrower itself. This also significantly wastes flamethrower fuel that would be more than enough to light thousands of firecrackers. I hope that makes sense.
In the beginning there was nothing, not just any nothing, but every kind of nothing, infinite nothings. In this infinite nothing there was a perfect nothing. This perfect nothing was the holy ghost, ultimate perfection. In order for the holy ghost to be real, it needed to be percieved, so god came from this perfect nothing. Like two halves of a whole, together they gave birth to the universe. Perfect symmetry in the beginning that decays into perfect nothingness, but out of this perfect nothingness in the time in between the beginning and end, life creates god, god which arises out of chaos to seek perfection for the cycle to begin again.
The simple answer: Because it takes a really long time for stuff to reach a fully entropic state, and there is a whole lot of stuff out there. A really, whole lot of stuff. And a really, really long, long time.
Entropy overall. Kind of like how you can clean your room and make it nice and ordered by shoving all your clothes in the closet. The mess is there and increases over time, but right here it’s nice and ordered.
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